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Thursday, September 12, 2019

Rock Died Years Ago. Can We Please Bury it?

“That’s because he (Johann Sebastian Bach - 1685-1750) is arguably the most important
figure in not just classical but all music: his influence is as keenly felt in
music today as it ever was.”

Year of Wonder –
Clemency Burton-hill

As if The Beatles haven’t been
praised enough over the course of the past 55 years or so, there is a nice
little movie called Yesterday which heaps on a bit more tribute to this
rock band. In one scene, the protagonist claims that the film’s eponymous song
is one of the greatest songs ever written. Wow, really? I guess he’s never
listened to Bach, or Mozart, or Beethoven, or dozens of other composers if he
can rate a simple little rock ballad among the greatest songs ever written.

Am I the only person who thinks
that rock & roll has been around way too long? For me, rock started
repeating itself by the end of the 1980s.

What I resent about rock is that
it has produced so few remarkable musicians. There isn’t a single piano virtuoso
to come out of the genre, no great saxophonists, violinists, or any other
instruments besides the guitar and drums. Rock had already endured far longer
than the heyday of jazz which only dominated the music world for perhaps 40
years, beginning its sharp decline when rock ascended.

And just forget about rap
music. They don’t play instruments, and they don’t really sing. It should have
been a brief side-note in music yet has been with us for 30 years or more.
Sorry rappers, rhyming just isn’t that much of a skill, and your puerile
doggerel hardly ranks as poetry.

Jazz produced legions of great
musicians on a number of instruments. In the age of jazz, talent mattered more
than anything. There were no poseurs or lip-synchers in jazz. If you couldn’t
play, you weren’t going to spend much time on the stage.

To take the center stage in the
rock era, all you need are a few simple chords and anything resembling human
speech. Singing is optional, as we have heard in rap music. Most of popular music today is more about image than what you can hear. Why should it matter what someone looks like in music?